This morning the power went out for over an hour and a half. I was able to shut down my computer, and Michael’s once I realized it would be more than a flicker. Shut down the power switch on our Windows box (poor thing isn’t on a UPS though!). I left the firewall (minute) running, figuring that since I had shut down every box I could get to it from internally that a hard shutdown by myself would be just as bad as the power in it’s UPS dying and it shutting down that way. And by leaving it running it would have a small chance of surviving the outage. After an hour and 30 minutes the UPS on minuge stopped beeping. Two minutes later the power came back on. I waited around a bit before turning my computer back on, figured it was safe and logged onto minute. I was able to resume my screen session… the box never went down! Woohoo! The DSL modem, switch, and minute all survived over an hour and a half on that UPS. It was great.
During the outage I was completely without a telephone because we hooked up that new cordless one, which is all neat and electronic and needing power. I did some looking for our corded telephone, crawling around in the storage areas and was able to find it finally. Michael said we’d probably want to plug it in somewhere up here, so I hooked that up today. Right now it’s a cord coming out of one of the doors to storage, and the phone is sitting on top of my computer, I’m sure michael can find a prettier way of setting it up when he has a chance. But now, for the first time in oh so long, we have two phones in the house, one of which can work during a power outage.
I played with Caligula a bunch today, he’s very playful, but still a little congested, and he’s not very hungry. It was getting quite warm in the house, so this afternoon me and Caligula retreated to the comfort of this air conditioned computer room. I spent the afternoon poking around some of google’s stuff. I noticed that they ran blogger,com. Free to sign up, why not? So I decided to play around with it, it’s almost completely customizable (still has a little banner ad at the top) and it definately has some issues (like being unable to properly count the number of posts I have, my timezone is different so it doesn’t count ones it sees as “posted in the future”). But I decided it’d be a nice place to keep my book reviews. There is an XML feed, but it’s sort of broken, you can go to it and view it as xml, but when fed into my reader it gives me errors.
While writing book reviews I thought of the website I had for #Andor (a Fantasy and Scifi book channel on Xelium). I had never liked it, not even when I first created it, and kept meaning to get around to redesigning, but I just had no inspiration. So this afternoon I decided what the site needed was dynamic content! New stuff that changed! We needed book reviews. Now I could have gone and written a php backend, played with .htaccess files, given logins, set up a database, etc etc etc and spent 3 days on this project that no one would appreciate, and I have no guarentee would even *use* Or I could take the easy way out. I set up a LiveJournal Community,
So I wrote up a bunch of book reviews of books I’d read recently for my new blogger site, and posted those and some other reviews of books I enjoyed on the livejournal community.
I was in IRC and a friend of mine who is spending a couple months in Sweden came online. She’s been keeping a blog of her adventures there, and in her post today she described “Swedish Oddities” wh
ich is some strange stuff about Swedes and Sweden that she’s noticed while she has been staying there. I think the funniest one on her list was:
When eating cereal, the milk is always poured in the bowl first, then the cereal is added so it is floating on top.
What are they thinking? What an odd way to make up a bowl of cereal! I’ll have to try it and see if it makes as big of a mess as I believe it will…
Michael should be home soon, need to make some dinner. Probably tacos. And we have ice cream for dessert, yay!
*wanders off*